Have something to say?

Ready to be published? LXer is read by around 350,000 individuals each month, and is an excellent place for you to publish your ideas, thoughts, reviews, complaints, etc. Do you have something to say to the Linux community?

LXer Weekly Roundup for 03-Mar-2013

It was quite the eventful week in Linux news. Linus goes off on (UEFI) Secure Boot option in the kernel, LG acquires webOS from HP, how the “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy program works and SCALE 11x kicks "trades" and takes "shows", Enjoy!

Linus Torvalds in NSFW Red Hat rant: Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has again vented his spleen online, taking on Red Hat employee David Howells with a series of expletive-laden posts on the topic of X.509 public key management standard. The action takes place on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, with Howell posting a request that Torvalds “pull this patchset please”.

One for the record books: The Southern California Linux Expo turned their annual event up to 11 this year in more ways than one. SCALE 11X, celebrating its 11th year as the first-of-the-year Linux/Open Source expo in North America, played host to more than 2,300 attendees visiting more than 100 exhibitors and hearing more than 90 speakers giving a wide variety of presentations during the course of the three-day event.

Booting desktop Linux on the Chromebook Pixel: Bill Richardson, a software engineer for Google, has detailed how to boot a conventional Linux distribution on the company's new Chromebook Pixel. Google released the Chromebook Pixel last week – the device costs £1,049, has a 13" touchscreen with a resolution of 2560×1700 pixels, a 1.8GHz Core i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and 32GB (64GB for the LTE version) of internal SSD storage. Where previous Chromebooks only supported booting Google's ChromeOS directly, the Pixel has an added option to support a third-party bootloader which enables it to be relatively easily modified to boot stock Linux desktop distributions.

LG Electronics Acquires webOS from HP to Enhance Smart TV: LG Electronics Inc. has acquired the webOS operating system technology from HP, the companies announced today. To support its next-generation Smart TV technology, LG has entered into a definitive agreement with HP to acquire the source code, associated documentation, engineering talent and related websites associated with webOS. As part of the transaction, LG also will receive licenses under HP’s intellectual property (IP) for use with its webOS products, including patents acquired from Palm covering fundamental operating system and user interface technologies now in broad use across the industry.

No Microsoft certificate support in Linux kernel says Torvalds: Red Hat's Secure Boot support is a case of the company wanting to "deep-throat Microsoft", according to a forthright posting from Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel developer mailing list. Torvald's comments were made in response to plans by a Red Hat developer to extend Linux support for Secure Boot. The comments have given rise to an ongoing discussion, during which several prominent kernel developers have shared their thoughts on Secure Boot support in Linux.

Will open science be web-based?: Just over a year ago, I wrote a column here on The H Open about the interesting points of contact between open source and science, especially as computers become an increasingly important tool for most scientists. Now it seems that other people are also beginning to see a connection.

Torvalds blasts Howells, Garrett over secure boot: No one, but no one, in the Linux community likes Microsoft's mandated deployment of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Secure Boot option in Windows 8 certified PCs. But, how Linux should handle the fixes required to deal with this problem remains a hot-button issue. Now, as the debate continues hot and heavy, Linus Torvalds, Linux's founder and de facto leader, spells out how he thinks Linux should deal with Secure Boot keys.

Every Install Should Be Minimal: It used to be a bit of an art to strip down Red Hat or CentOS down to the absolute minimum needed for a server install. I’ve ranted at length about how the default install for servers included a full blown Gnome desktop, including games. Thankfully, CentOS 6 has a special iso download, which I feel is built specially for me, called the Minimal install. After installing this image a few times, I’m convinced that every Linux install should be a minimal install.

Torvalds clarifies Linux's Windows 8 Secure Boot position: No one, but no one, in the Linux community likes Microsoft's mandated deployment of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Secure Boot option in Windows 8 certified PCs. But, how Linux should handle the fixes required to deal with this problem remains a hot-button issue. Now, as the debate continues hot and heavy, Linus Torvalds, Linux's founder and de facto leader, spells out how he thinks Linux should deal with Secure Boot keys.

SCaLE 11X: A very large very small show: SCaLE 11X is over, but not forgotten. It still reflects the heartbeat which drove Open Source into being. Russell says, "A few days ago, I had the privilege of attending SCaLE 11X in Los Angeles. And for me, it truly was a privilege. It had been over 5 years since I had the joy of attending a true Open Source conference of any real size, and what I found at SCaLE really excited me."

Tipping the SCALE: I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, and certainly I am not. Honest. But one of the problems with working on a show like Southern California Linux Expo and this year’s SCALE 11X leaves me little time to do anything but the wood-chopping and water-carrying that goes with being the publicity chair for the show. Let me be clear: This is not a complaint, but rather an explanation about why you’re not going to get a comprehensive report about the event. Others are doing that for me, and it was as great as they say it is; possibly moreso.